Eli Adler is a professional cinematographer/director with more than thirty years experience. He has won numerous awards, including the CINE Golden Eagle and two National Emmys, for his work. As a child of a Holocaust survivor, he has filmed several Holocaust-related films, including Hope Out of the Ashes (1985), a short narrated by Liv Ulmann about the San Francisco Holocaust Memorial sculpted by George Segal, Loosening The Grip (1999), filmed in Berlin and Auschwitz and One Day In Auschwitz (2015), produced by The Shoah Foundation to commemorate the 70th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He was also a prolific contributor to the Shoah Foundation Interview Program (in the San Francisco Bay Area.)
Eli spent his formative years in Skokie from 1959 until his family moved to nearby Wilmette in 1967. Although he didn’t live there during the “Nazi years”, he still maintained a close association with the World’s Largest Village. The 2009 dedication of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, IL and Chicago Tribune journalist Howard Reich’s article Memories of the Skokie That Was inspired the original blueprint for the film. Surviving Skokie won the 2015 Mill Valley Film Festival Audience Favorite Gold Award in the Valley of the Docs category.
ELI ADLER
BLAIR GERSHKOW
Blair Gershkow is a documentary and feature editor with credits on all the major broadcast networks, including PBS’ The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, ABC’s Good Morning America and Nightline, PBS’ Great Performances, Oprah!, and CBS’ 60 Minutes. Gershkow edited Silicon Valley: The New Gold Rush for CNN, and Fox 2/5, the story of the first Marines deployed into Iraq—which won a national Emmy for ABC’s Nightline. More recently he edited the San Francisco Symphony’s series for PBS, Keeping Score, which aired nationally on PBS. In 2008, Gershkow edited the independent documentary The Judge and the General, which also aired nationally on PBS. The film won the prestigious DuPont-Columbia Award, as well as nominations from the Directors Guild of America and the National Emmys.
In 2009, he edited the 4-part independent series, Saving the Bay. Narrated by Robert Redford, it chronicles the history of San Francisco Bay. In 2011, Gershkow completed the editing of San Francisco Symphony at 100, which celebrated their 100th anniversary. The film won him his 4th Emmy. He edited a biopic on noted jazz musician Wynton Marsalis in 2012, as well as the video for the gala opening of SFJazz, the new concert venue in San Francisco.
THE FILMMAKERS
